Nolte: Commie Folk Singer Woody Guthrie Not Woke Enough for Mob

The fascist woketards are now attacking communist* folk singer Woody Guthrie for the “patriotic rhetoric” in his classic anthem This Land Is Your Land.

An American Indian writer at Smithsonian Folklife admits the lyrics to ThisLand Is Your Land “shake me up like a soda can every time I hear them.”

These lyrics shake me up like a soda can every time I hear them. As an activist, folk musician, and songwriter (in Lula Wiles), and recent label-mate of Woody Guthrie on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, my social circles tend to worship Guthrie as the father of all musical protest. But as a Native person, I believe “This Land Is Your Land” falls flat.

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By critiquing “This Land Is Your Land,” I don’t mean to imply that Guthrie himself promoted conquest, but the song is indicative of American leftists’ role in Native invisibility. The lyrics as they are embraced today evoke Manifest Destiny and expansionism (“this land was made for you and me”). When sung as a political act, the gathering or demonstration is infused with anti-Nativism and reinforces the blind spot.

The overall piece is some 2,700 tedious and self-aggrandizing words long, one of those endless, simpering essays that is three times longer than necessary because the writer is so terrified of saying something “incorrect” the unfortunate reader is buried in all her ass covering.

Anyway, in 1951, Woody Guthrie — one of the giants of the far-left movement, one of the godfathers of activist artists, and a proud fellow traveler — wrote This Land Is Your Land as a direct rebuke to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America, as a protest against what he saw as Berlin’s “glorification” of America.

Here are the lyrics [emphasis added]:

This land is your land This land is my land
From California to the New York island;
From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and Me.

As I was walking that ribbon of highway,
I saw above me that endless skyway:
I saw below me that golden valley:
This land was made for you and me.

I’ve roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;
And all around me a voice was sounding:
This land was made for you and me.

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

What’s fascinating about all of this is that Guthrie opposes any kind of property ownership while his Folklife critic believes the land should be owned by — and rightfully belongs to the American Indian — even though a number of American Indian tribes took their lands by force prior to the evil Western European’s arrival.

In other words, on the Woke Scale, Guthrie still wins. But he’s a white male and she’s a female Indian, so the Woke Affirmative Action Plan still gives her the win.

*Many Woody Guthrie defenders point out that their hero was never a “card-carrying” member of the communist party, that he never officially signed on. While this is true, he did perform at communist party rallies, he did write for the Daily Worker, and he believed communism was the only answer.